Abstract

Revegetation of depleted native vegetation can
address both salinity mitigation and biodiversity
conservation objectives. Financial capacity is a
major impediment to landholders undertaking
revegetation. We used a mail survey of landholders to
examine the potential of enhanced financial incentives for
achieving substantially increased revegetation in the
Goulburn Broken Catchment, Victoria. There was
considerable interest in our proposed incentive scheme,
with 51 per cent of respondents indicated that they would
revegetate some of their property, at a price. Most of the
landholders who responded positively to the proposal
already intended to undertake same revegetation, with the
additional financial incentives enabling them to
revegetate a larger area. Across the dryland portion of
the catchment, we estimate that, over five years,
landholders would revegetate about 19,756 ha at a cost
of $18,471,079 ($935 per ha). This is additional to the
7,624 ha of native vegetation that would be re-established
without the proposal. However, the total revegetation
would not be sufficient to meet biodiversity conservation
targets for several high priority vegetation types.
Similarly, the proposal is likely to achieve only a
marginal improvement to the amount of tree cover in
areas of high priority for salinity mitigation. Economic
incentives will not therefore, by themselves, enable
biodiversity conservation and salinity mitigation targets
to be achieved. Incentives need to be integrated with
other instruments such as revolving funds, regulations
and continued education programs.